Hacker News Reader

Is he a Minecraft fan?? If so, Minecraft has a very active modding community and that might be a great place to start.

He has played a lot of minecraft but has not shown interest in modding.

There is a MOD for minecraft called 'ComputerCraft' it has a LUA based programming environment with a basic OS (filesystem, console) and various API (including a HTTP API). You can use it in game to control and interact with various things.

To see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrUHUhfCY5A&list=PLah_Dh8PIq... (the video's author, Direwolf20, had a good MOD pack including ComputerCraft).

Of course it's not directly creating a game, but perhaps a fun way to get introduced to programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com